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Weather 2013

Pretty normal spring here-- all over the place! We've had days above 10C, sunny and no fresh precip for weeks, snow melting everywhere (still lots left though) then back to wintry conditions with a fresh 6 inches or more of snow, nights to -14C, days -4/-5C, then tomorrow to 11C with rain and/or snow, back down to just above freezing with more snow maybe on the weekend, etc etc!

Cohan, you have a lot more winter than I have for sure! Seems the coming night will be the last one below 0C in this row. I cross my fingers and hope for at least 6 months without freezing temperatures!

Our first thunderstorm of the season. and our first bit of moisture since the snow stopped. It rained hard but briefly and it was already dry enough to walk on the back of the cliff in the morning. We really need some soaking rains.

Trond- I'd probably need 2 or 3 years to get 6 months without freezing in total ;)Snowing again today- was forecast for up to 25 cm by tomorrow, but its been melting as it fell all day, now they say 5-10cm, with flurries for next 3 days... on the plus side, this is good moisture, slow and soaks in in areas where the ground is thawed (still lots of standing snow)..

We are supposed to have some fast moisture today! (I am sitting and waiting for it - should have been here now!?) A rainstorm is on its way from the ocean and with the soil frozen still and much snow on higher ground inland flooding are expected. The last months we have had hundreds of wildfires (they are much smaller than those some of you experience though) and the farmers have prayed for rain.

Good luck with the flooding! We had half a day of snow that melted as it fell, then it started accumulating in the afternoon with water underneath, and probably got to around 15cm or so. Enough we had to shovel so as not to have our driveway wet until fall! The sun came out though, unexpectedly, so there is a lot of melting already...

March 2013 - Explained from www.wunderground.comDuring March 2013, residents of Europe and the Southeast U.S. must have wondered what happened to global warming. Repeated bitter blasts of bitter cold air invaded from the Arctic, bringing one of the coldest and snowiest Marches on record for much of northern Europe. In the U.K., only one March since 1910 was colder (1962), and parts of Eastern Europe had their coldest March since 1952. A series of exceptional snowstorms struck many European locations, including the remarkable blizzard of March 11 - 12, which dumped up to 25 cm (10”) of snow on the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey in the U.K., and in the northern French provinces of Manche and Calvados. The entire Southeast U.S. experienced a top-ten coldest March on record, with several states experiencing a colder month than in January 2013. Despite all these remarkable cold weather events, global temperatures during March 2013 were the 9th warmest since 1880, said NASA. How, then, did such cold extremes occur in a month that was in the top 8% of warmest Marches in Earth's recorded history?The Arctic Oscillation (AO) is a pattern of varying pressure and winds over the Northern Hemisphere that can strongly influence mid-latitude weather patterns. When the AO is in its positive phase, jet stream winds are strong and the jet stream tends to blow mostly west to east, with low-amplitude waves (troughs and ridges.) Since the jet stream marks the boundary between cold Arctic air to the north and warm subtropical air to the south, cold air stays bottled up in the Arctic. When the AO is in its negative phase, the winds of the jet stream slow down, allowing the jet to take on more wavy pattern with high-amplitude troughs and ridges. High amplitude troughs typically set up over the Eastern U.S. and Western Europe during negative AO episodes, allowing cold air to spill southwards in those regions and create unusally cold weather.

The Arctic Oscillation refers to an opposing pattern of pressure between the Arctic and the northern middle latitudes. Overall, if the atmospheric pressure is high in the Arctic, it tends to be low in the northern middle latitudes, such as northern Europe and North America. If atmospheric pressure is low in the middle latitudes it is often high in the Arctic. When pressure is high in the Arctic and low in mid-latitudes, the Arctic Oscillation is in its negative phase. In the positive phase, the pattern is reversed.

We've had some wildly variable jet stream patterns in recent years in the Northern Hemisphere. Just last year, we had a strongly positive AO in March, when our ridiculous "Summer in March" heat wave brought the warmest March on record to the U.S. The first day of spring in Chicago, IL on March 20, 2013 had a high temperature of just 25°F--a 60 degree difference from last year's high of 85°F on March 20! During the past five years, we've set new monthly records for extreme negative AO index for six of the twelve months of the year:

-4.3: February 2010-3.4: December 2009-3.2: March 2013-1.5: October 2009, 2012-1.4: June 2009-1.4: July 2009Charles S NE USA